Misrepresenting Halliday (1961)

Fawcett (2010: 24):

Reading "Categories" is demanding work, and the reader's task is not eased by the fact that only rarely does Halliday illustrate the abstract concepts that he is presenting with examples. Ironically, by far the fullest exemplification of the concepts comes in the 'grammar' of meals (viewed as another social construct) that is presented in Section 9! There are occasional indications as to what the elements of the units of the clause in English would be like (e.g., in Section 4.3), but there is no attempt to provide a full set of descriptive categories for any aspect of the grammar of English or any other language, other than the list of units on the 'rank scale' of English. For example, there is no indication of what Halliday considered at the time to be the full set of classes of group.  

Perhaps the most surprising omission is that there is no visual representation of the full structure of a clause-length text that has been analysed in terms of the categories proposed in this key paper. One direct result of this is that there is no indication as to how the various units in a the description of a clause are to be related to each other in an integrated representation of structure.

Blogger Comments:

This series of negative judgements, complaining of the absence of structural representations in Halliday (1961), is misleading because it studiously ignores the explicitly stated purpose of 'Categories of the theory of grammar'.  Halliday (2002 [1961]: 37-8):

My purpose in writing this paper is to suggest what seem to me to be the fundamental categories of that part of General Linguistic theory which is concerned with how language works at the level of grammar, with brief reference to the relations between grammar and lexis and between grammar and phonology. … 

No excuse is needed, I think, for a discussion of General Linguistic theory. While what has made linguistics fashionable has been, as with other subjects, the discovery that it has applications, these applications rest on many years of work by people who were simply seekers after knowledge. It would not help the subject if the success of these applications led us into thinking that the theoretical problems were solved and the basic issues closed.